SYDNEY — After 17 days on strike, Woolworths warehouse workers, members of the United Workers Union, won a victory, pushing back the company’s attempt to impose new speedup rules. More than 1,500 workers at three warehouses in Victoria and one in Sydney walked off the job in a fight for new contracts. While the warehouses are on different contracts, their coordinated strike strengthened the fight.
Woolworths is the biggest supermarket chain and the largest private sector employer in Australia. The strike was having an impact, with shelves emptied the month leading up to Christmas. A week into the strike, Woolworths claimed it had lost 50 million Australian dollars ($32 million) in sales.
Workers won an above-inflation wage increase at all four sites. But, as pickets told the Militant, the strike wasn’t primarily about wages, but about safety and ending the speedup the bosses were imposing through a new “productivity framework.”
The new agreements contain a clause that ensures workers will not be disciplined for the speed they can work at, and an acknowledgement that not everybody can meet the 100% target. This “is a significant achievement,” said Tim Kennedy, national secretary of the United Workers Union.
The “framework” that Woolworths introduced last year included automatic punishment if workers fell behind the rate. It introduced surveillance of workers designed to speed up work at the distribution centers.
This push to work faster undermines safety in an already dangerous industry. According to Safe Work Australia, workers are now more likely to be injured at Woolworths than in coal mining.
“To get performance everyone has to work unsafe,” one young woman at the Erskine Park warehouse picket in Sydney, who is still on probation and asked that her name not be used, told the Militant. Under pressure to meet rates, “the pickers” on ride-on pallet jacks “come flying out of the aisles” where others are working on high- reach forklifts.
An older worker, who has worked at Woolworths for over 25 years, described the pressure the company is putting on her to shift at times from receiving to picking and to meet the 100% productivity rate.
In an attempt to break the strike Woolworths applied to the Fair Work Commission, the federal arbitration agency, to have the United Workers Union’s picket lines ruled illegal. The commission ruled in the bosses’ favor Dec. 6, but strikers kept the picket line encampments up until they won new contracts.
This fight sets an example for other workers. Some 150 workers at the Coca-Cola plant here voted Dec. 9 to take strike action in a fight for higher wages.